Research On System Crash And Hang Issue

In current situation reliability is a rapidly growing concern in contemporary server hardware industry, both for server administrator as well as software developers. To improve reliability and dependability, system designers and programmers must consider having the functionality to enable the tracing log to detect any kind of server failure problem. To improve operating system dependability, systems designers and programmers must analyze and understand the failure data to find the real culprit. Recent trends on the software industry have shown that the number of software development projects and their increasing complexity will continue to increase the demand for skilled programmers. However, debugging technology and techniques have not kept pace and valuable programmer resources are being wasted in debugging cycles. Correcting this trend requires innovative approaches and ways to assisting programmers during the debugging cycle to make them more productive both time wise and with respect to how thoroughly the OS and software are debugged and troubleshoot.Microsoft also provides infrastructure to harvest and analyze error reports from Windows systems. This infrastructure makes it possible for System engineer to harvest and analyze their organization's problem with relatively modest investments.The main purpose of this dissertation is to research Windows internal architecture and analyze Windows dump for crash and hang problem to find out the culprit. This dissertation also introduces lots of useful tips and tricks for debugging Windows kernel memory. In this dissertation both Windows usermode and kernelmode components are discussed in detail to understand Windows internal data structure which is required to troubleshoot memory corruption and code overwrite problems. This dissertation also covers the research for the Memory and Kernel resource leaking problem on the server.A diagnostic tool named "Crash and Hang" alos calledC&S is developed during this dissertation period. The C&S tool is written based on standard Windows driver model. This tool demonstrates number of common device driver bugs, including accessing freed memory, overrunning buffers, and leak memory which are required for this dissertation work. It also has ability to cause server hang in order to show the effects of drivers that don't cancel I/O requests which is also implemented and analyzed in this dissertation. Finally the dumps which are generated by C&S tool has been debugged to find the real culprit for server hang and crash problem.